Tag Archives: Jim Feast

A Double-Tongued Troubadour: An Interview with Jeffrey Cyphers Wright

by Jim Feast

A self-described New Romantic poet, Jeffrey Cyphers Wright is also a publisher, art and literary critic, eco-activist, impresario, filmmaker, and visual artist. He is author of nineteen books of poetry, most recently a collection of sonnets and collages titled Doppelgängster: Self-Portraits in a Funhouse Mirror (MadHat Press, $21.95); his work has also appeared in anthologies ranging from Best American Poetry (Scribner, 2023) to Contemporary Surrealist and Magical Realist Poetry (Lamar University Press, 2022).

Wright, who published the long-running all-arts magazine Cover in the previous century and now publishes Live Mag!, has received the Kathy Acker Award for his publishing and writing. In the following interview, we discuss how all the doubles and others in his life as a poet add up to a singular, ongoing practice.

Jim Feast: My first question stems from a conversation we had about one of the poems in Doppelgängster, “Truth vs. Meaning”—you said that poem was “off to the side” of the main themes of the book. So, could you clarify what those main themes are?

Jeffrey Cyphers Wright: The themes, motifs, and icons that appear in the collages and poems engage a muse. My subjects represent a search for individuality within a context of membership in a family, a tribe, and a relationship. Romantic love, sex. A pioneering spirit harkening to my upbringing in West Virginia and Arizona. And being hep, defined in some older dictionaries of slang as “someone who could swing on any scene.” I wanted to be that someone. A merger of the Beat’s forbidden fevered pitch and the New York School’s breezy, cosmopolitan elan.

“Truth vs Meaning” presents a larger-than-life character, a sort of Everyman called “Mr. Universe.” It hints at political strife, personal responsibility, and selflessness, but after a bravura beginning, the character fumbles—he is after all, “outré” himself, eccentric but prepossessing. Never quite fitting in and yet bearing within himself nobility, agency, and aplomb. Like a troubadour, he is staying in someone else’s castle, or as this poem has it, he finds himself on a set, as if in a dream.

JF: How do the themes inform your process?

JW: Themes help structure the poems and propel them along. They color in the persona and become like characters in a play, providing an anticipatory tone. Double entendres and conundrums vibrate. Phrases blur momentarily before snapping into focus, as when “a naked siren and a burning fire engine” are contrasted in an ironic exchange. Such super-packed images hint at Symbolism but generate new, contradictory meanings. Going back to “Truth vs. Meaning,” a false choice is offered between related—but separate—ideals. 

JF: Your poems are full of complex interplays and inlaying—I have to ask how you put them together.

JW: You “hear” a phrase in your mind and go: get up some steam, mumble along trying to say something, a twist here, a turn there, and invent, record, note, steal, personify—“November is packing its brown valise.” I’m attuned to alliteration, music, rhyme, cadence, association, appropriation, even affectation—I use everything in the craft box to keep going with white hot volition.

Then you can rearrange lines and edit bits here and there. Sometimes the initial impulse is erased in the revision. Some poems are really opposed to being written in one rush. Still, poems that need too much editing probably aren’t worth it. As Ted Berrigan, my mentor, said mercifully, “A poem doesn’t have to be perfect. It just has to work.”

JF: In “Les Fleurs de Nuit,” you use the phrase “lead by dreaming,” which brings up a key dimension of your writing. You often begin with an evocation of a time and place: “Old dandelions tip / white hats to the wind.” Surprisingly, such evocations are followed by dream images: “We were toys in Babeland.” Can you comment on your combination of nature poetry with surrealism?

JW: That title began as an allusion to Baudelaire, but it’s also an unintended metaphor for dreams. That poem is unusual for me in that it has six dreams in it leading up to the final couplet, so it all fits together. I like to stick a dream in a poem if I can. It’s like an ingredient that most recipes can use—and inherently authentic. 

Sometimes nature suggests a lesson. In “Rough Patch,” after “Old dandelions tip / white hats to the wind” comes “What’s above, calls / on what’s below.” We want to rise to the call. Nature becomes a stand-in for the muse, I think. I look and listen and maybe hear an inspiring line of description in my head. Images are the bones of a poem, and lyricism is the heart. From there you can jump-cut to other quotidian or ethereal elements.

“Learn by doing—lead by dreaming” is a misquote that I worked up. The poet is often seen as a dreamer. I think people look to poetry and dreams for the same things—magic, prophecy, and wisdom. One could also say learn by leading. The poet is fulfilling a shamanistic role in society, so there is often a moral bedrock revealed or an ambition pursued. Poetry has a spiritual quality people seek, especially as organized religion fades and leaves a vacuum. This is not new, but it is dire. The original Romantics saw nature as a gateway drug to the sublime. 

People can be drawn to poetry for information as well as for an emotional reward. So I research topics and make the poems informative. It’s also good to balance adages, epigrams, encomiums, and dictums, such as “lead by dreaming,” with natural elements. It’s okay to make statements: “Let us be measured by devotion.”

I keep my eyes peeled for some connection with the natural world that suggests a simile such as “the wolf moon goes down like butter.” My poem “Temporary Sanity” starts off with a stanza that observes the natural world:

Winter’s white heart steams.
Venus pins night to the sky.
A few stars are hung out to dry.

And then I switch tracks, introducing the persona/observer who moors the collection: “On call at the dream hospital, / my gang of bells rings.” From there the poem goes into a persona-driven New Romanticism, interacting with the muse: 

Listen. Your canals can hear
my eyelids beating time
into wings of gold foil. 

This nod to classic Romanticism deepens the texture, mixing into and counter-balancing the jaunty banter. The poem is an embodiment of their juncture, their jouissance (and, yes, there is sexual content).

In the final couplet, the poem returns to the wider world it began with and ends up personifying nature: “Snow only really talks / when it starts to melt.” It suggests that to commune with our inner nature and each other, we must let down our guard. It also hints at the specter of global warming.

JF:  Your poems often feature playful reversals and scrambling of cliches and commonplaces, which to me suggests a rejection of the dead language of banality. The line “I always led from the back of our class. / . . . It wasn’t / our thing to be official” suggests this rebellious stance began in high school.

JW: Yes, e.e. cummings and his nonconformity changed my world in high school. Playing with language is key for me. And I like that you say “commonplaces.” One can convert the cliche to make it a touchstone, a common denominator between the audience and the abstracted landscape of the poem. My classmate at West Virginia University, Jayne Anne Phillips, told me not to use cliches in 1972, but it only made me more aware of them as a class of phraseology that could be mined. Palindromes, anagrams, typos, malapropisms, mondegreens—all these offer new ways to “crack” the code, break the rules, refresh language, and find new meanings when combined with subjects that range from the personal and ordinary to the political and environmental. 


JF:  You mentioned your use of a persona. This persona, moving amid the reverses and outpourings of your vivid language, seems a slippery fellow, yet he also anchors the proceedings.   


JW: He’s very slippery, but also revealing. The persona is upholding a set of principles, adhering to a standard as the troubadours did, and spreading knowledge of proper behavior for a courtier (see Paul Blackburn’s translations). Ted Berrigan’s “Code of the West” exemplifies this impulse to transcribe the tenets of the tribe and identify its boundaries. 


You have to lure a reader and then steer them through the poem using both conventions and inventions. You pack meaning, knowledge, and experience within the artifice of whimsey, lyricism, and imagery to create insight. And frankly, there’s an entertainment aspect audiences go for.


Myths are another inspiration/ muse source: “Hello, Sybil. Old fortune teller.” Orpheus, Pinocchio, Santa, Cupid, Hippolyte, Circe—my persona hangs out with the myths to become a legend. Ed Sanders wrote about this with regard to the myth-making of Charles Olson, that he could do it “safely & without duplicity.”

The central thrust is simply discovering an order while pursuing varying threads to a conclusion. As my old landlord used to say, “Work hard, have fun.” Celebrate life and contribute. 


JF: Your poems are chock full of amazing epiphanies; have any come via a personal epiphany? 


JW: A breakthrough moment came in an Alice Notley workshop. She instructed us to write while she read some texts. My effort became “Malaise in Malaysia,” and you can see the word play there, the alliteration, assonance, and anagrammatic quality. It was a revelation about how a poem could be stitched together from various patches of language to make a crazy quilt.

JF: Your poetry also draws language and metaphors from many different realms, and as a publisher, you created Cover Magazine and then Live Mag!, both of which combine art and writing from various fields. I see in the publishing a link to your poetry’s all-embracing tendency. 

JW: All-embracing—I like that. Ted Berrigan was rather “all-embracing.” In 1978 he told us young guns at St. Mark’s to start a magazine—publish your friends and some poets you really admire. I’ve been doing that ever since. Publishing has encouraged me to reach out to writers and widen the horizon.

My girlfriend told me one should read twenty poems for every poem they write. I never had better advice. Running a magazine means you really live with poems—choosing, designing, proofing. Reviewing is even more insightful; you see patterns emerge in others’ writings that may later become part of your own lexicon. The magazines are especially helpful in creating events and maintaining community. Writing art criticism also hones my language skills.

JF: You have often spoken of your poetry as part of the New Romanticism. Can you describe more about this movement?

JW: It’s about extending beauty and experiencing passion. At Brooklyn College (where I studied with Allen Ginsberg and William Matthews), I became enchanted with Sir Thomas Wyatt and Sir Philip Sydney, who brought the sonnet, the persona, and a proto-Romantic impulse to the forefront. (I was also having a torrid affair and was deeply in love; my muse liked that.) I learned about Romantic symbolism such as the “blue rose” and discovered John Clare (one of John Ashbery’s favorites). The Romantic impulse never goes away. A lot of erudition started going into my work, and that continues. 

There was also a New Romantic moment in the late 1980s that included fashion, classical music, and art, and I felt tied in with that. Lord & Taylor ran an ad in the Times that blared “New Romantic” and I used it in a workshop I taught. I thought we needed a better tagline than “New York School Third Generation” or “St. Mark’s poets.” And I still believe the emotional tenor of the Romantics is built into our poetry DNA, as is Surrealism. I find New Romantic qualities is in the work of contemporaries like Elaine Equi, Will Alexander, Bob Holman, Dorothea Lasky, Sampson Starkweather, Kevin Opstedal, and Andrei Codrescu.

JF: Another thing that gives your poems traction is reference to family. You say, for instance, “From my mother I inherited // easy grace and savior faire.” In the poems, this network of relations includes friends and colleagues, too.


JW: Before I got to New York in 1976, my family moved a lot as my father climbed the academic ladder. So, we were a tight family, but I had to keep making new friends, and I was keen on knowing the latest slang as a point of entry.

I saw the New York school mentioning their friends all the time, and it worked for me. I’m in awe of my circle: “What dudes we be, / skimming masks of glass / across a bourbon sea.”

JF: Some poems in the book are paired with your drawings and collages. It’s almost a chicken-egg situation: Did a picture inspire a poem, or did the poem lead to the visual art? How do words and images interact in Doppelgängster?

JW: There is a recurrence of iconographic/archetypal imagery that appears in both my text and visual work. Sometimes the two overlap, but they’re not usually created simultaneously. Pinocchio is a natural “persona” for me to identify with—along with many others who have appeared over the years—so Pinocchio appears in both a poem and artwork. Other subjects include Tinker Bell, Aladdin, chimeras like the mermaid and the gryphon, and mythic characters. 

Once I have a motif, I tend to recycle it from time to time. The cuckoo clock is an example of a motif I was repeating both in verse and imagery. Lori Ortiz, who designed the book, made the pairings based on feeling and tone, as well as subject.

So I would say these are parallel practices. There is a collage quality to my poems—juxtapositions of images, shifting scales and perspectives. A palette of varying textures. Rhyming shapes. Different directional focuses. The collage is built, and the poem is too—with a lot of pondering, structuring, and conjuring.

JF: In an artist’s statement you sent me in an email, you say these poems bring two aspects of your personality into juxtaposition, yielding “self portraits partially created by admitting an ‘other’ self (a doppelgänger).”  Do you anticipate psychic benefits from this doubling?  


JW: Hopefully. [Laughs] You can only see yourself in a reflection in a mirror, a lover, or a muse—or in self-reflection. Self-reflection is another way of developing character, and you can find this ‘other’ self by trying to meet the challenges a poem requires. One deals continuously with the duality of being one among many, the observer and the observed, and to the extent that these two interact, the more the poems live.

The poem is an instrument that looks into your soul—both writer and reader. 


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Rain Taxi Online Edition Spring 2024 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2024

A Wild Vitality: An Interview with Jerome Sala

by Jim Feast

I met Jerome Sala in a college class in Chicago in 1970. We became fast friends and, always being hipper than me, he introduced me to many strange byways in poetry, art, and music. I moved to New York City while he continued writing poetry and creating new ways of presenting it in Chicago; in 1981, he was crowned the first “heavyweight champion” of competitive literary bouts in that city, in a format that pre-dated (and inspired) the poetry slam. A few years later, Sala moved to New York City, where he and his spouse, the poet Elaine Equi, have been a vital part of the city’s poetry scene.

Sala, who holds a Ph.D. in American Studies from New York University and works as a copywriter, is the author of eight books of poems, the latest of which is How Much: New and Selected Poems (NYQ Books, $20). Other titles include Corporations Are People, Too! (NYQ Books, 2017), The Cheapskates (Lunar Chandelier, 2014), and Look Slimmer Instantly (Soft Skull Press, 2005). His poems and essays have appeared in The Brooklyn Rail, Conjunctions, Pleiades, Boundary 2, Rolling Stone, among other places, and he keeps a blog on poetry and pop culture called espresso bongo.

Jim Feast: It used to be noted how advertising and political platitudes were woefully diluting terms such as “democracy” or “freedom”; now, as you point out in poems such as “To Content,” it seems all language has lost significance. In response, your poems often take words from corporate jargon that never had any meaning in the first place and infuse them with a wild vitality. Is this one of your goals?

Jerome Sala: Definitely. Having worked as a copywriter for many years, I witnessed how sometime in the ‘90s, all types of creativity—music, video, writing, etc.—got dumped into a single category, “content.” Just as industrial capitalism gave birth to new abstractions such as “labor power” and “value,” the information economy now gave birth to this abstraction, and “To Content” is about this change. It begins:

you are like a word-picture-video flow
whose every element is special, but as part of a feed
(feeding whom?)
             also generic

a textual form of meat product:
like the old Aristotelian notion of “substance”
nothing in itself
but the something out of which all is made

Since, as you mention, language is losing its specificity, I try to bring attention to this through satire; I treat the insignificant, the debased, as a source of great truth. Philip K. Dick, one of my idols, once theorized that the Logos could be found in cheap ads on the back of matchbook covers—I play with this idea in my poetry.

JF: In “Corporate Sonnets,” a sequence of Browning-like monologues, you present a gallery of sham entrepreneurs, cutthroats, business nobodies, and flimflammers, revealing the souls of speakers who, by definition, have no souls. I wonder whether these portraits are taken from life or are invented to represent the corporate typology.

JS: When I first started writing “Corporate Sonnets,” I collected business clichés from email solicitations, work conversations, business magazines, online ads, and motivational books. The idea was to satirize the language by collaging these expressions—none of the poems were portraits of actual people. But I discovered something surprising as I wrote: though the sonnets were made of nothing but jargon, they started to seem, almost by accident, as if they were characters speaking—Browning-esque, as you mention, or perhaps even like the voices in Edgar Lee Masters’s Spoon River Anthology. Here is the first “Corporate Sonnet” I composed:

I don’t know if I still have the bandwidth
to think outside of the box. I’m good at
identifying the low-hanging fruit
but innovation? Disruptive technologies?
That stuff may be for the millennials
to decide. Good luck to them. As for me,
well, there comes a time in all our lives
when you’ve got to just drink the Kool-Aid
and get with the program. Ok, sure,
you’ve no longer got the mojo
to break down any silos, but at least your
morale is no longer in the toilet.
I’m still entrepreneurial and proactive,
I’m collaborative, competitively priced and non-reactive.

The fact that this collection of expressions sounded like a someone baring their “soul” made me wonder if our souls were in fact made of clichés. In any case, when I performed the “Corporate Sonnets” at readings, it wasn’t just people who worked in offices that appreciated them; social workers, academics, and factory workers related to them too. It seems all walks of life are now defined by their jargon—and people are delighted when you make fun of it.

Today, cliché has invaded all realms of language. Sometimes I think that a dramatic play in which the actors communicate only in cliches might be both hilarious and poignant—it would “speak” to our moment in a particularly engaging way. As Umberto Eco quipped: “Two clichés make us laugh. A hundred clichés move us.”

JF: In a dialogue with Jack Skelley on the Best American Poetry blog, you say that in your poetry you often take “the most fleeting instances of culture and write about them as if they were holy monuments.” In conversation, you’ve told me this nuanced approach to pop culture was something you witnessed in the Chicago art and writing scene, and I wonder if you can say more about that here.

JS: One of the Chicago artists I was thinking about was Kevin Riordan, who created the cover for How Much? and many of my other books. With a connoisseur’s eye for trashy culture, he takes pop influence into a whole new dimension, collaging imagery not just from icons, but more esoteric sources. My wife, the poet Elaine Equi, guest-edited an issue of LAICA Journal (Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art) with Riordan on the theme of “discarded icons.” The contents of the issue, derived from ads, comic books, film, etc., wasn’t merely pop, it was obsolete pop—in a way, what was being celebrated was the fact that our culture is impermanent. Such an approach to pop culture is also influenced by punk, another strong force when I was growing up in Chicago. As an example of how Riordan’s pop collage approach has affected my writing of poetry, here are a few lines from “Hollywood Alphabet”:

I am an amateur alien living in Amityville
in a Batman costume, on leave from Babylon 5.
I can’t tell a cat from a canary from a Wes Craven movie from a
   William Castle movie
yet I get déjà vu when I think of Philip K. Dick dancing with Judge
   Dredd after dancing with a wolf.
T.S. Eliot once said that ethnographic study offered a form
   of empowerment for Everyman – that and exploitative cinema.
Well maybe he didn’t. . . .

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

                                                            Hollywood, you see, is more
   about image appropriation than individuation—
as such it’s a Janus-faced town, a kind of Jurassic Park
where dinosaurs like Steven King, Freddy Krueger and Stanley
   Kubrick have gone extinct
quicker than you can say Herschel Gordon Lewis, or the Legend of Hell House.

JF: The approach of treating mass culture as if its icons “were holy monuments” is a perspective not unknown in universities—an environment you are familiar with, since you have a doctorate in American Studies. However, something not typically found in campus productions is the slashing humor you use in such works as “Let’s Hear It for Frederick’s of Hollywood.” Indeed, you often have a triple-barreled comedy, poking fun at the absurd solemnity of pop culture, the pretensions of academic studies of pop culture, and the sacrosanct classics of poetry, which also come in for some good-natured swipes. How did your use of humor develop?

JS: There are three influences I’d like to mention when it comes to satiric/comedic touches. First, I’ve always loved comedians such as Rodney Dangerfield, Jerry Lewis, and Sarah Silverman. Second is a very traditional literary mode, the mock-heroic—I’m thinking here of Swift and Pope, who, to achieve their satiric effects, would write about commodities such as makeup and earrings as if they were mystic, alchemical objects.

Third is having worked as a copywriter. Marx, a great satirist himself, admired capitalism’s tendency to profane whatever it readied for sale, and an ad writer experiences this process in a very intimate way. You work with the arbitrariness of words—anything can be made to mean anything else. From this perspective, not just pop culture but academic study of it can seem a bit pompous. Nevertheless, I value “theory” and academic criticism highly; such writing helped me get through my job as a copywriter by exposing the ideological clichés that fuel business writing (something satirized in “Corporate Sonnets” and many of my other poems).

Speaking of ideology, it’s funny how even a classic cartoon series like The Flintstones reflects it. Historical research suggests that Stone Age societies were communistic; in the cartoon series, though, the society we see is a thriving, industrial capitalist one. The beginning of my poem on this series alludes to this goofy transformation:

stone age
communism
turns
capitalist

owning property
working for the man
and loving it

natural
as a brontosaurus crane
or a purple
pet dinosaur dog
named Dino

JF: I see your work as addressed to a specific audience. In your early Chicago performance poetry, there was a raucous give and take between you and the audience, with listeners often taking lines as individual insults or jokes. Now, in less raucous days, the audience is incorporated in each poem; not only is a sketch provided of the persona speaking the piece but there is an implicit profile of the audience this speaker is addressing.

JS: Thinking about audiences reflects, I guess, a vain wish that what I write could extend beyond a strictly poetry audience. In the old days, Elaine and I performed to crowds that were literary, arty, and punk. This mix is called out in a playful way in an early poem, “In the Company of the Now People”:

I wasn’t going to talk about all you over-the-hill go-go dancers
but here you all are in your little white go-go boots
and there’s Joe Tiger and Lenny Leopard
along with the lady wrestler with a bone in her hair
and mamma mia what next?
a Dalmatian in a tutu?
it just makes me stop and think—
I must be in the company of the now people

I guess you could say this early work addresses the nightlife of the crowd. Later, I started addressing daytime life—office work, for example. The approach turned to satirizing business talk, or even business fashion, and the funny ways the drama of nightlife gets funneled into the banality of daily work.

I’m not sure whether such writing appeals to a specific audience or not, but, judging from response at readings, people seem to get a kick out of poems written with this goal in mind.

JF: Both you and Elaine are fascinated with everyday products and how they change over time, but there is an interesting variation in the way you write about them. In her poem “Monogrammed Aspirin,” for example, she examines with a phenomenological lucidity how she reacted to the change in pill shape of Excedrin. By contrast, in your Coke sequence, you reflect on the philosophical implications of product change. What do you make of your mutual love of these objects—and the difference in the way you approach them?

JS: I think what both of us find appealing in these common objects and products is their very commonness. We both believe, in keeping with that Philip K. Dick quip I mentioned earlier, that if you’re looking for secrets about the way a culture works, you need to look at what you are numb to—the banal items you encounter daily. As you say, Elaine’s approach is more phenomenological, literally—phenomenology is her favorite branch of philosophy. In her poem “The Thing Is,” for example, she writes about how objects lack “the inner life” once bequeathed them; they have become cold, reified things. Her writing, influenced by Francis Ponge, rediscovers the aura of objects in witty, often humorous ways. An unusual feature of her style is that her writing can be mystical, even visionary, and humorous at the same time. If Elaine’s work is more concerned with the “object” part of the commercial object, I’m more fascinated by the marks of commerce it bears. What caught my interest about the marketing of New Coke, Classic Coke, and Cherry Coke back in the ‘80s was how the flavor of each carried an ideological message: New Coke’s sweetness preached the optimism of youth (it was closer to Pepsi, a brand marketed as “young”), Classic Coke the seriousness of tradition, and Cherry Coke predicted our current moment, in which brands turn profits by marketing diversity.

JF: When we were in college, you introduced me to an older painter, Lady Bunny, and her Bohemian friends. The Bohos, I learned, had preceded the Beats and considered themselves the real outlaws. Your verse sometimes portrays this division between outsider groups. In poems such as “Beatnik Stanzas,” where you intone, “no madness / no angels /  . . .  / no gone daddios / no haunted lightning,” you look askance at the Beat zeitgeist; in other pieces, such as “The Stoners,” you speak of a more authentic underclass group that contains “rogue impulses.” I see this as you suggesting that even if some countercultural groups may end up seeming “square,” there will always be a group resisting the corporate program.

JS: What I was satirizing in “Beatnik Stanzas” was not the actual Beats themselves, who produced some of my favorite writing, but the commodification of their image (think of the classic sitcom The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis or Roger Corman’s wonderful film A Bucket of Blood). That’s why the poem is filled with goofy lines like “my visioned darkened / and I threw away my turtleneck / in a dream.” But the phenomenon you mention, one generation casting doubt on another, helped me see how what’s cool can become cliché within the space of a few years. In comparison, a poem like “The Stoners” displays a hint of optimism. As you suggest, it states that no matter how the image of “the rebel” is commodified, a new generation appears with a workaround; punk, for example, appropriated the appropriators—repurposing trashy culture for its own uses—and that appropriation has already been reappropriated, as might be expected. Nevertheless, when something becomes a cliché, there is usually a segment of the culture that abandons it. Lightning cannot be housed in a bottle. As Bakhtin wrote, “There always remains an unrealized surplus of humanness . . . All existing clothes are always too tight, and thus comical.” Or as “The Stoners” puts it,

How is it then that these flaneurs continually rise from extinction

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Are they something more than themselves—
rogue impulses without words or images of their own
but which nevertheless, like a flood
pick up people, houses and trees along the way
to a destination they never reach?

Rain Taxi Online Edition Spring 2023 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2023

Thought Interruptions:
An Interview with Barbara Henning

by Jim Feast

Before Barbara Henning moved to New York City in 1984, she already had a reputation in Detroit as a poet. Her first reading in NYC was at St. Marks Poetry Project, and her first collection, Smoking in the Twilight Bar, was published by Lewis Warsh (United Artists Books, 1988). Recently, United Artists also published Digigram ($16), which like Smoking in the Twilight Bar is a collection of prose poems, but that’s where the similarity ends. The poems in Smoking are slow paced, almost like tiny films of Detroiters in the 1960s and 70s, while the poems in Digigram are fast paced, more interior, a mind reporting on multi-faceted layers of life.

Henning has also written six other collections of poetry and five novels, as well as interviewing and reviewing many poets. She’s also an editor and has taught for Naropa University and for Long Island University in Brooklyn, where she is now Professor Emerita. After raising two children as a single mother, she left the East Village and lived and travelled widely in New Mexico, Arizona, the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, and in Mysore, India, where she practiced yoga and studied with Shankaranarayana Jois while writing her novel You Me & the Insects (Spuyten Duyvil, 2005). I met Henning in 2015 at a reading for one of Lewis Warsh’s classes, having previously known her only through her writings, and am pleased to discuss Digigram with her in the following interview.

Jim Feast: Your Digigram poems are made up of bits and pieces woven together: thoughts, incidents, descriptions of city streets, snatches of the daily news, and, significantly, encounters with random people. The inclusion of these encounters suggests one purpose of the book is to take the temper of the time.

Barbara Henning: I live in NYC and I like talking with and observing strangers. Because I’m concerned about social justice, I’m interested in people who are ignored, on the sidelines, passed by, left out. While I was writing this book—as with A Day Like Today (Negative Capability Press, 2015)—I kept a daily journal where I recorded incidents of all types, as well as moments of serenity in the midst of our sometimes-chaotic NYC life—at least the life that we used to have before Covid, before we became afraid of each other. We live in neighborhoods affected by those who are nearby and far off and in this global world, we affect others often without even realizing it. If something happens on the other side of the world, reverberations and variations occur here, too. I’m trying to be inclusive in these poems of the near and the far. In both A Day Like Today and in Digigram, I think I’m also celebrating the dissonance and harmony of our daily NYC lives and I’m trying to see and understand my life in the greater context.

JF: Anthropologist James Scott’s writing makes clear that those who seem to be completely without power have ways to resist and maintain their dignity through solidarity, collective ritual, and spiritual practice. Much in your book records similar strategies used by those in less advantaged positions. Would it be correct to say you are highlighting these moments, underlining how people are coping with the current reactionary political climate?

BH: I care deeply about what is going on and so it will show up in my poems, stories, observations, and in the collaged material I select. I have practiced yoga for 25 years, lived in India, and the individual and collective responsibility is part of yogic philosophy. What we do and how we talk affects those who are around us. One of the yoga sutras that has been extremely helpful to me is “When you are thinking negatively, think the opposite.” Of course, you have to determine what the word “negative” means. It doesn’t mean you can’t be critical or make judgments. It means that you can flip the thoughts that are destructive to your wellbeing and the wellbeing of those around you, see more clearly, and thereby take thoughtful action. This is something I try to practice; of course, I am a stumbling human being like everyone else, but I try. This thinking exercise has become a way of making sense of my world; you might see this in the poems. I might in fact be working on my mind by writing my poems.

For many years I have experimented with material that I recorded in my journals. In Digigram, I selected words, then went to The Times archive for the days in question and searched for the same words in other contexts. These collaged phrases, usually just a few words, interrupt my ordinary way of thinking and bring in a wider context. Since 2016 when I started these poems, the country, the whole world has been in shock. The global and local news is on the lips of everyone and this affects the way we collectively think, talk, and even sleep. And so, when I was sitting on the subway taking notes, it all worked together—my experience, their experience, the wider context. We are a community. I think of these poems as digital thumb prints of the city and the times (of course, filtered through my consciousness).

JF: Poems such as “In A City Like This” in A Day Like Today seem quite close to those in Digigram; yet, as you mention in a note, Digigram was particularly inspired by the writings of Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven. Could you talk more about her and discuss how your encounter with her changed your poetry in this volume?

BH: What makes Digigram very different from A Day Like Today is that the political and economic worlds in which we live changed radically almost overnight. At the time Trump was elected, it felt like everything crashed at once. The entries I was making in my journal reflected this; I couldn’t write the same. I was shocked and angry. The news changed, too. At the same time, I was reading Body Sweats, a collection of poems and art by the Dada Baroness, Else von Freytag-Loringhoven. She is outrageous, raging against public taste and modesty, taking to task any possible pretension, living her life as art, ecstatic, celebrating improvisation and madness as a preface to poetry. She was one of the most published women poets in The Little Review, and then after she died, she was pretty much forgotten, a poem published here and there. I was very happy to find this collection by Irene Gammel and Suzanne Zelazo. The poems that I was really drawn to are the prose poems and her crazy use of dashes. It’s like her mind speaks notes, fragments of thought that stream along, full of emotion.

I picked up on the speed of the poems and her use of dashes, but because I used a lot of dashes does not mean I dashed them off. First, I’d write a poem in lines and work on collaging, and then I’d translate it into a fast-thinking digigram. The improvisational moments came first in the journal and then with the translation; it was like the poem was suddenly speaking to me.

Years ago, I read an essay by Mikhail Bahktin called “Speech Genres.” He was writing about how language is passed from one to another through small phrases; he, of course, didn’t describe it this way but that’s how I remember it. Bahktin’s ideas about literature and language became a part of my poetics; he saw the novel as a chorus of voices, and even though he didn’t see the same possibility for poetry, a poem can definitely be that, too. After I wrote these poems, I realized that I was probably also influenced by Alice Notley’s epic poem, The Descent of Alette. Notley used quotation marks to stop the reader from reading so fast, to highlight speech genres, to bring the language forward. Her poem is a long narrative and Alette defeats the tyrant. Digigram is not a fictional narrative; it is a collection of fast-moving, autobiographical poems.

JF: In a work you are doing about your mother’s life, you combine extracts from letters, photos, reconstructed dialogue, newspaper clippings and other historical material. Can we see this prose book as taking collage techniques developed in the poems for use on a more complex canvas?

BH: While writing my last two books of poetry, I was also working on a hybrid-biography of my mother’s life, Book of Ferne. Like most of my poetry (but not necessarily my novels), with this project, I worked with various methods of collection and disruption. I collaged larger pieces of text, fictionalized stories and memories as well as photographs and news clippings. When I began the project, I had only the photographs and memories of an eleven-year-old girl. To understand the historical period, I went to the archives of a newspaper that was popular with the working class, The Detroit Times, a Hearst newspaper, in existence almost the same span as Ferne’s life. Mostly, I read issues that were published on her birthdays and other important days in her life, selecting clippings that were important to women and families. So, yes, to answer your question, I used very similar methods, but with images and on a larger scale. Now I have to find a publisher and it’s nothing like anything I’ve ever written before, 280 pages, half images.

JF: In “Now and Again,” you mention Walter Benjamin. When, just now, you talked of “the whole world . . . in shock” over the current political situation in the U.S., it made me think of some of Benjamin’s reflections. In his book Walter Benjamin: An Aesthetic of Redemption, critic Richard Wolin says that during the Nazi rise to power, “Whether or not autonomous art could be salvaged seemed to Benjamin an entirely otiose, scholastic question. All prevalent tendencies pointed, in his view, to such art’s imminent demise and the incorporation of its dying vestiges into the fascist program of self-glorification.” Certainly, we are not in the position Benjamin wrote from in 1936, but if you look to the horizon, do you see a similar marginalization and erasure of non-mainstream writing? If not, what are the prospects of alternative writing?

BH: In our culture, writing can become commercialized, less radical, less truthful, even within an experimental framework that is no longer experimental; sometimes it’s more about careerism. Even with the left, we can move toward rigidity and start setting up expectations that limit artistic expression, similar to what happened with social realism. I think it’s cyclical though; I don’t see the future demise of non-mainstream art; visual and word artists keep changing and evolving new forms and presentation as the culture shifts.

Years back when I was involved in reading more theory and critical writing, I read many of Benjamin’s essays. I mention Benjamin in two poems in Digigram, in reference to his miniatures in Berlin Childhood. These pieces by Benjamin are personal and lyrical, and yet for the most part he avoids an emotional or nostalgic view. Instead, he brings us into the child’s awareness of places and people in Berlin in a world that had already disappeared. At the time he was writing, Hitler’s party was coming into power and Benjamin was in exile from his home. One of the miniatures he had eliminated from his collection, “The Moon,” is, to me, the most beautiful of all: the moon suddenly expands in an apocalypse taking the past with it. I think he may have eliminated this miniature because of the emotion expressed. I was drawn to it for that same reason; this book became part of the landscape of my daily life while writing Digigram.

JF: While most of the poems describe “our sometimes-chaotic NYC life,” in some poems you go back literally or in memories to Detroit; yet you write of it as, “my place, my childhood—never to return.” In talking of the past in conversation, Lewis Warsh remarked that it seems to promise more than it delivers. While Digigram acts to preserve the present moment, it seems also, particularly in pieces about Detroit, that there is doubt about whether this is really possible.

BH: The poem “Room to Run” is about a dream, blending into memories, and memories are part of the present. They are how we write history, but in poems and other literary works, memories take on added resonance, getting us closer to the lived experience. But the replay, as Lewis says, can never get quite close enough. Here I am an eighteen-year-old who just ran away from home, a working-class suburb of Detroit, now living in the city and taking the bus to downtown for work. Jefferson Avenue and most of Detroit at the time was a vibrant city still full of shops. In 1967, after the racial violence and subsequent white flight, the city changed dramatically. I left for New York City in 1984. When I return now, it’s hard to recognize that world. It’s gone. But it was there, and I lived through that time. It’s important to understand where you’ve been.

JF: To continue on this point, Benjamin argues fascism can only prosper by negating the past. As he wrote, “Like every generation that preceded us, we have been endowed with a weak Messianic power, a power to which the past has a claim.” This claim is for a liberated, equalitarian society, which is in touch with nature. Would you say your work can be construed as supporting this tendency, fighting to preserve the special heritage of positive impulses?

BH: Yes, even if we can’t actually reach the goal of a “liberated, equalitarian society, in touch with nature,” it is part of my aim as a writer, citizen, teacher, mother, neighbor to work toward it. When we give that up, I think we are in trouble. A lot of us realize now that we had been taking for granted some progressive advances we had made, and we weren’t aware that a fascist undercurrent was in fact rising. Instead of functioning in a framework of gloom, anger and constant frustration, I hope my poems and writing reflect my own struggle to stay with the positive in my interactions with friends and strangers.

JF: The poems play with a speaker who is at times a narrator observing and at others intervening to help the have-nots; at still others, she joins the have-nots, as when she is forced to give up her apartment due to a rent rise. Do you see this variation of roles as significant for the book?

BH: I’m not thinking about this as I write. I’m just writing about my day in NYC. I’ve experienced struggle. I wasn’t born with a golden spoon. I grew up in a working-class family at times very hard up for cash, left home at 18, worked my entire life, was a single parent for many years, put myself through college, helped my children, and just recently at 71 paid off my student loan. I don’t own an apartment or a house and as an older person, I still worry about the future. However: I’ve never been homeless, I have two children, a very small retirement account from LIU, and I’ve always felt confident that I could find work. I see people around me in NYC who have given up, perhaps with dire childhood experiences and a lack of hope for the future. I talk to students with major problems in their lives, some who were abused, some who are caring for parents, grandparents and large families. All these people are everywhere in my life (and probably in your life too), and so they appear in my poems.

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